1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a billing system extension for facilitating the configuration of new product offerings and billing tariffs associated with the delivery of telecommunications products and services. The present invention provides a charging framework for configuring tariffs and calculating the charges associated with internal event tariffs in order to provide charging data to the billing system for generating customer bills.
2. Background Information
Generating customer bills for telecommunication services is a complicated process. Telecommunications service providers typically provide multiple services, and are adding new products and services at an ever increasing rate. Each service typically has its own peculiarities and challenges with regard to calculating service charges. Complicating the billing process further is the fact that each base product or service typically has multiple variants. For example, a base product or service may have multiple price lists depending on a customer's monthly access usage, or based on bandwidth requirements, or other criteria that distinguish different service plans. Special promotions may be provided from time to time which would again alter the price charged for various services. Each service variant must be considered individually in order to calculate the appropriate charges associated with delivering a specific product or service package to a customer.
Another complicating factor in generating customer bills for delivering telecommunications services is that there are often multiple charges that contribute to the total amount charged for delivering a particular product or service variant to a customer. A particular product or service may include charges for monthly usage, recurring monthly fees for equipment rental or line charges, and the like, a one time activation fee or cancellation fee, taxes, and other charges. The amounts charged for each of these components may be the same or different than the amounts charged for other service variants.
In many telecommunications service billing systems, including Accenture's ACS Billing Solution based on Intec's Singl.eView For Convergent Billing (Singl.eView), a product and service offerings are configured and stored in a database. The product configuration contains all of the particulars necessary to define a product or service offering. The product configuration will include data such as, among other things, a product name and various other attributes that distinguish the product or service offering from other product or service offerings. Another significant component of the product configuration is the identification of charging tariffs attached to the product or service offering.
Charging tariffs are software objects which identify the charges associated with a configured product or service offering. A product or service offering may include separate tariffs for external usage charges, taxes, and various internally generated charges such as recurring rental or other monthly service fees, one-time activation or deactivation charges, and the like. The present invention relates the configuration of internal event tariffs and the calculation of the charges associated therewith, such as recurring monthly charges and non-recurring activation fees and other charges. Such tariffs are referred to as internal tariffs because they are events generated within the billing system itself, as opposed to external tariffs such as usage tariffs which are triggered based on input from external sources such as network switches and the like.
As mentioned above, there are multiple product or service attributes that influence the charges applied to a customer's bill relating to the delivery of a particular product or service. Since the total charge is merely a compilation of the charges associated with the various tariffs attached to the particular product or service, some or all of the product or service attributes influence the charge component generated by each of the various tariffs attached to the product or service offerings. Because some or all of these attributes are different for different product or service offerings, the calculation of charges for tariffs will be different from one product to the next. In the past this has required different formulas and different inputs for calculating each tariff for each product variant. This requires extensive changes to the billing system environment each time a new product or service or a new product of service variant is created. In many cases new tables must be added to the database or extensive changes must be made to existing tables to in order to accommodate new product or service configurations and new tariff configurations. In the Singl.eView package and other billing packages, the charging logic must be configured as a hard coded logic. Expensive both in terms of the resources required to implement the new product or service offerings, as well as the amount of time necessary to implement the changes.
Implementing the changes to the billing system can significantly delay new product and service offerings. In a competitive environment where new products and services are a key factor in attracting new customers and retaining existing customers, the delay and costs involved in rolling out new products and services can be very detrimental to a telecommunications service provider's performance. The present invention provides an improved mechanism for configuring new products and services and internal charge event tariffs associated therewith and for calculating the charges associated with such tariffs.